Twitter Releases Massive Data Sets

YouTube had an outage last night and the world went crazy. Thankfully I was out to dinner with friends and didn’t even notice.

9to5 Google did notice, and reported that “after an agonizing two hours, YouTube servers and PlayStore transactions are simultaneously beginning to recover. The two issues seem likely to be related.”

OMG…YouTube was down for two hours, people! Panic in the streets! I really don’t think life as we know it can go on.

Get a frickin’ grip.

Now for me, such panic would ensue only if Amazon Prime or Netflix went down. In fact, I was trying to finish out the third season of “A Man in the High Castle” the other night and I started getting Amazon’s version of the buffering pinwheel.

I almost broke out the flint and tinder (the stuff you make fire with, not the…oh, never mind).

Meanwhile, to the story du jour…Bloomberg is reporting that Twitter has published data sets comprising millions of tweets, images, and videos and thousands of accounts linked to operatives based in Russia and Iran, “who have sought to use the platform for nefarious purposes.”

Nefarious purposes like shutting down YouTube for two hours and sending people across the U.S and Europe into widespread panic? That kind of nefarious purpose?

Twitter indicated it was opening the data up to the public “to encourage independent analysis by researchers, academics and journalists.”

The announcement comes as EU officials are bracing for attempted meddling by Russia-backed operatives and their copycats ahead of the bloc’s elections in the spring, where far-right parties are set to make gains.

The datasets are made up of 3,841 accounts affiliated with the Internet Research Agency, 770 other accounts potentially in Iran as well as 10 million tweets and more than 2 million images, videos and other media.

Maybe they can hire Cambridge Analytica to analyze all that data and produce a report of their findings?